This article analyzes the impact of The Community Resources Group Receivership Program undertaken from 1998 to 2002 that provided clean property titles to residents in several informal housing colonias (subdivisions) in South Texas. Survey data were gathered from 260 low‐income households comprising two populations: those who had secure title from the outset, and those who were beneficiaries of the land titling program. Focus group interviews were conducted to explore how the beneficiaries construct the meaning of ownership before and after title “regularization.” Formal titling consolidates understandings of absolute property relations in comparison with de facto rights born of use (legal or not), which strengthens people's sense of self‐esteem and potential for political involvement. We found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, title provision per se appears to have little direct impact either upon home improvement or upon residents' receiving enhanced access to credit and financial services. We also found evidence that informality and illegality is likely to reemerge as owners die intestate, and as they revert to informal land market property transfers.

The 2006 class action against James Frey, concerning his fabrications in A Million Little Pieces, was the first suit of its kind in the United States. There is nothing new about false memoirs, so what can explain the lawsuit? When the book was promoted on “Oprah's Book Club,” viewers were invited to respond emotionally, and saw their responses as a form of testimony. Those responses produced a sense of betrayal and inauthenticity when Frey's falsehoods were revealed. This view finds support in the eighteenth‐century sentimental novel, which similarly linked readers' reactions to the author's emotional authenticity. Fraud was an ongoing concern for sentimental novelists, some of whom used elaborate editorial to ploys to disavow responsibility for the text, while others populated their novels with fraudulent characters, intended as foils for the protagonist. An investigation of these novels helps to reveal the implications of the Frey case for future claims of literary fraud.

This article examines the impact of the application of apparently impartial principles of procedural fairness and natural justice on the construction of “authentic” and “inauthentic” knowledge of Aboriginal culture. It discusses the progression of the Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island) court cases and the legal construction of public participation in the making of political decisions affecting Aboriginal interests in land. In examining the politics of competing interests in land, this article reflects on the tension between Indigenous interests in land and settler developmentalism in relation to the Australian jurisprudence of procedural fairness and natural justice. The arguments running through the article concern the questions of the ways in which the liberal restraint on power is embodied in the impartial principles of administrative law, where that power creates rather than infringes upon rights, why it generates a particular legal construction of Aboriginal interests in land and cultural heritage, and the extent to which this plays a role in the maintenance of relations of settler‐colonial dispossession.

Section 106 of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) requires that federal agencies “must take into account” the impact of their regulatory actions on historical properties, among them the “traditional cultural properties” of American Indian tribes. Conceiving of tribes' own social practices in terms of property creates the possibility for making claims about its loss for tribes, but it also problematizes their cultures' inherent dynamism that implicates its putative authenticity. This article offers commentary on the implications of practicing a form of action anthropology for the concept of culture via discovery and explication of such property under the NHPA. The context is a small American Indian community's effort to resist the development of a copper‐zinc mine adjacent to its reservation, on land that holds significant meaning for the community.

In 1996 a provincial court was established at Eskasoni Mi'kmaq Community in Nova Scotia, Canada, in response to overwhelming evidence confirming the failures of the Canadian legal system to provide justice for Indigenous peoples, and as a specific recommendation of the Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr., Prosecution. Marshall, a Mi'kmaq wrongfully convicted of murder, served eleven years of a life sentence before proving his innocence. The importation of provincial legal culture into an Indigenous community creates tensions and contradictions surrounding the legitimacy, authenticity, and efficacy of Indigenous laws. The ontological conflicts that arise from the imposition of a justice system integrally linked with colonization, criminalization, and assimilation cannot be resolved through indigenization of court staff and administrative conveniences. The Mi'kmaq continue to assert their laws and articulate their legal consciousness against the co‐optation of dominant system, with mixed results.

In this article I reconsider Hopi tradition as jurisdiction—reflexive moments of Hopi legal discourse that orient to the limits of Hopi sovereignty, even as they presuppose its power. I explore these themes in two significant moments of Hopi political history. First, I consider the uses of tradition in the creation of the contemporary Hopi tribe through the field notes of the US agent charged with drafting the 1936 Hopi Constitution. Then I consider more contemporary uses of tradition in recent Hopi tribal court cases that extended judicial power over matters reserved for local village leadership. Both instances suggest efforts to potentialize tribal power even as they orient explicitly to the limits of that authority. These traditions are thus, ironically, understood not as replaying Euro‐American logics of nationalist totalities, but as indigenous sociopolitical actions that unsettle static representations of Hopi cultural identity and the sovereignty claimed through them.

Herbert Packer's

The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (1968) has spawned decades of commentary. This essay argues that Packer's two‐model conceptualization of the criminal process is best understood within his professional milieu of doctrinal legal scholarship and the political context of the Warren Court revolution. Within this context, the essay suggests a distinction between two due process visions: formalism and fairness. This distinction is useful for illuminating debates and decisions on criminal procedure matters in the Supreme Court such as Terry v. Ohio (1968) and Apprendi v. New Jersey (2000). I conclude by encouraging sensitivity to legal and historical context in future commentary on Packer's framework.

In their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein use research from psychology and behavioral economics to argue that people suffer from systematic cognitive biases. They propose that policy makers mitigate these biases by framing people's choices in ways that help people act in their own self‐interest. Thaler and Sunstein call this approach “libertarian paternalism,” and they market it as “the Real Third Way.” In this essay, I argue that the book is a brilliant contribution to thinking about policy making but that “choice architecture” is not just a solution to the problem of cognitive biases. Rather, it is a means of approaching any kind of policy making. I further argue that policy makers must take externalities into account, even when using choice architecture. Finally, I argue that libertarian paternalism can best be seen as motivated by what Sunstein has celebrated in his work on constitutional theory: a humility about the possibility of policy‐maker error embodied in Learned Hand's famous aphorism about the “spirit of liberty” and an attempt to reduce social conflicts by searching for what John Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.”

The hundredth anniversary of the original publication of Eugen Ehrlich's Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law is nearly upon us. The book earned high praise from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roscoe Pound, and Karl Llewellyn as one of the outstanding works of its time. Ehrlich has been identified as an early legal realist, a pioneering figure in legal sociology, and a leading theorist of legal pluralism. In this retrospective review, I explain the strengths and weaknesses of this classic book. Ehrlich articulated an unsurpassed account of dynamic social‐legal change, an account that remains fresh and timely today.